NidalM Photography / Blog / Photoshoots / Virgin Promotion

Virgin Promotion

Posted by NidalM on Jul 16th, 2009 | 4 comments

You would think that spending a day touring the pyramids would be pretty damn near perfect already. One would ask, how could it get any better? Well, for starters, you could spend the rest of the evening hanging around celebrities. And then to top it all off, you could be asked to tour around the country with the celebrities for the rest of the week. That was pretty much my Thursday.

I waited nervously in the lobby of the Semiramis Intercontinental, all showered and cleaned up after the hot and dusty pyramids tour, waiting for Ahmed Ahmed and Maz Jobrani to come down. Ahmed and Maz had been asked to come to Egypt to perform in the “Egypt’s First Comedy Rumble” tour, which was organized by Benchmark Productions. Today was meant for everybody to meet everybody and for promotional events to advertise the shows.

For some reason, my mind blanks out now on my first meeting with Ahmed and Maz. Maybe it was the extreme emotional stress of meeting somebody who I’d last seen in a blockbuster movie. More likely it’s just my extremely bad memory retention. I forget meeting most people… :s

It was then that I met Taylor Feltner and Mousa Kraish as well. They were working with Ahmed on a documentary titled “Smile on Arabia: Just Like Us”, which aims to highlight the similarities between Western and Eastern cultures. You guys already know Taylor, he was in Saudi Arabia as well, during the LOL Tour, working on the same documentary. If you think Mousa sounds familiar, theirs a good reason. I couldn’t believe my luck!

Getting into the cars brought in by Benchmark, we were all shuttled to City Stars, the largest mall in Cairo (if not Egypt). I rode with the film crew and got to know Taylor and Mousa. It was here that Taylor said he would be interested in some of the pictures I took for the documentary they were doing.

We got into the mall through the service entrance, by passing through a series of tunnels and hallways through the main structure. We had numerous run-ins with security, who had issues with all the equipment we were carrying, but in the end made it safely to Virgin, all limbs and equipment miraculously intact.

1/60s @ 24mm (Sigma 24-70mm), f/4 ISO400

City Stars mall in downtown Cairo. The place is huge, and it looks like the entire population of Cairo descends to here at night.

1/40s @ 39mm (Sigma 24-70mm), f/4 ISO400

In the waiting room in the administration of the Virgin store. Mousa interviews Ahmed while Taylor shoots for the “Smile On Arabia” documentary.

1/60s @ 34mm (Sigma 24-70mm), f/4 ISO400

The 3 other comedians at the show (left to right) Ted Alexandro, Maz Jobrani and Angelo Tsarouchas. The Egypt tour was part of a much larger tour for these comedians. They had recently been to Kuwait and would make stops in Lebanon and Dubai.

1/80s @ 24mm (Sigma 24-70mm), f/4 ISO400

Angelo REALLY knew how to have a good time. Some conversation we were having just caused him to break down with laughter. And it really was a breakdown… The man laughed for 10 minutes straight

1/60s @ 39mm (Sigma 24-70mm), f/4 ISO400

And as you might expect, laughter is contagious… Angelo’s insanity soon passed onto the rest of us… At this point I knew the next few days would be awesome.